Steerpike

After months of diary-juggling, Keir Starmer finally got his meeting with the man who could be the next US President. The political equivalent of the Rumble in the Jungle happened last night when Starmer sat down for a two-hour dinner with Donald Trump, following the Prime Minister's speech at the UN General Assembly. Details of what Trump and Starmer talked about are scant: the official read-out merely says they discussed the 'longstanding friendship' between Britain and America. But we do know that among attendees at the Trump tower dinner was David Lammy, who once called his host 'a woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathizing sociopath.' How times change eh?

All is not well in the Labour party at present. If Sir Keir Starmer didn't have enough on his plate, what with concerns about cronyism and the ongoing freebie scandal, one of his own backbenchers seems rather publicly out to get him too. Diane Abbott has been particularly active on social media lately, using her platform to slam Starmer's top team throughout their first party conference in power – and the Corbynista is pulling no punches. First going for the main man himself, Abbott posted a grainy photo of Sir Keir at the weekend as the frockgate saga ramped up, accusing the PM's top team of being 'in the pocket of millionaires'.

The general election may have been and gone but north of the border another fight is shaping up. The SNP has lost both members and support in the wake of Nicola Sturgeon's resignation, the police probe into party finances and the party's inability to find a new indyref strategy. Meanwhile, Scottish Labour under Anas Sarwar has seen its fortunes markedly improve – and even ex-SNP MPs have confessed to Mr S they see the group leader as the country's next First Minister. How very curious... Sarwar spent a lot of his time at Labour conference making moves around the 2026 Holyrood election. Speaking in Liverpool in conversation with Andrew Marr, the Scottish Labour leader tore into the current nationalist government.

The ravens really are leaving the tower. In recent months, Reform has been turbo-charging its professionalisation drive, working to set up branches across the country as part of their efforts to elect enough MPs to form the next government. There's been a big back office clear-out and tonight it sounds like there has been another casualty: this time one of the fledgling party's best-known faces. Gawain Towler – the last great amateur in British politics – has been fired from Reform after two decades spinning for its previous iterations Ukip and the Brexit party. Towler is a long-standing veteran of the Eurosceptic movement and is a familiar face to anyone who has attended one of Nigel Farage's colourful press conferences over the years.

To Liverpool, where all the wit and wisdom of Sir Keir’s Labour party is gathered. Starmer’s army has come to the city armed with bright ideas and insightful opinions — and no one more so than Bell Ribeiro-Addy.  The Labour MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill has been thinking long and hard about the woes her party has faced this last week — cronyism accusations, a freebie fiasco and anti-Sue Gray leaks, to name but a few — and has come up with a solution. To help Starmer better handle press scrutiny, Ribeiro-Addy has suggested the Prime Minister should consider, er, regulating the press. If you want to deal with a problem properly, go to the source, eh?

Party conferences are never short of hyperbole. Whether it's on the conference floor or the late night bar, impromptu speeches and after dinner speeches are often peppered with the kind of comments which come back to haunt a political party as their fortunes change for the worse. And while this year's Labour jamboree is only a few hours' old, it seems we may already have our quote of the conference. Congratulations to Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, for issuing this challenge to fellow delegates when he addressed them earlier today: I want our Labour Party to become the natural party of government. A title the Conservative party claimed for years, but we can take it from them. We have the chance to prove that we are the changemakers.